Alt Text: Google Knows You’re Buzzing About Buzz

You can’t say Google is resting on its globe-encircling laurels. Recently the massive search company created Google Wave, an innovative collaboration tool that brings people together so they can work to figure out what Google Wave is good for.

So far, the service’s main function seems to be getting people to send out invites to Google Wave, but Google is pretty sure that once every single person on the planet is participating in the exclusive invite-only preview, someone will figure out what to do with it.

Call it the Twitter effect: There are currently so many companies competing to provide services people want, like e-mail, photo-sharing, video-sharing and pasting the heads of famous people on random naked bodies, that the only chance to make a splash online is to create a service that nobody has ever asked for, and invite enough people so that the masses figure out what to do with it for you.

I can’t remember anyone in the history of textual communication saying, “Man, this message system has too many characters! I can practically fit a whole paragraph on this thing!” And yet, in spite of my early skepticism, I’ve discovered that Twitter is an indispensable way to dispose of jokes that aren’t good enough for this column.

But this isn’t about me. This is about Google, a company that has moved on from creating a tool nobody asked for to creating a tool people are actively angry about. The aptly named Google Buzz has gotten people talking excitedly in forum threads with titles like “How do I turn it off????” and “PRIVACY WARNING PLEASE READ.”

The original version of Google Buzz raised privacy concerns by — I’m not quite clear on all the details here, so I may be making this up — automatically setting up a social network for you based on your Gmail contacts, then sending out a message to all of them saying, “Google Buzz is so awesome! And nothing about it raises privacy concerns!”

After an initial outcry, Google agreed to change “awesome” to “rad,” and to only send out the message to people who are, according to the company’s top-secret online research, not too worried about privacy.

Since then, Google has made a series of privacy concessions, including the following:

• The opt-out page is now available in English, rather than just Urdu, Bengali and Middle Frisian.

• The service no longer mails Droid owners’ locations to their mothers every half-hour.

• Google has pledged that Buzz will “only spam your contact list with half the meaningless crap that Facebook does.”

• When you take a picture of yourself with a Buzz-enabled phone, the service will no longer automatically paste your head on a random naked body and add it to your Buzz feed.

• After you choose to unfollow people, you will now no longer follow them.

• Buzz will publish your home phone number to your profile page, so people who inadvertently expose your personal information can call and apologize.

Privacy advocates are not entirely mollified, mostly because they’re still pissed about that Google Street View photo of them adjusting their underwear. Google has responded by saying, “We have heard their concerns, and we want to assure them that we understand where they’re coming from and know where they live.”

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to turn on, log in and opt out.

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